How mediaman started their web page design journey

Summary

Bardington is a music company focusing on production, promotion and distribution of music (physical and virtual). In earlier days companies like Bardington have been called record labels ;-). Bardington ist focussed on Pop, Pop/Rock, Singer/Songwriter Music with some Hip/Hop, R&B artists. Heavy Metal and Dancefloor are not focussed.

As the next step in the creation process of our corporate identity we need a high-professional website (homepage only) design.

Company name

Bardington

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

To make things a lot easier for you we've designed a draft that shows our general idea. Please consider that this is only a draft - creative concepts are very welcome. In the brief package – provided onhttp://dl.getdropbox.com/u/504992/9…on_web.zip
you'll find a jpg-file that shows all the needed elements on our homepage – again: this is only a draft and doesn't represent any design details. The package contains photos and sample CD covers as well.
Description of elements:
0. General
- fixed with (not more than approx 940px for content; we don't want horizontal scroll bars on 1024-screens)
- background that gives impression of full width site
- if possible not vertical scrollbars if possible
- all pink text will be HTML (sans-serif or Tahoma prefered, no Verdana)
- white text can be graphic (pls use only Bardington corporate font family Gotham rounded, cf. zip)1. Logo- can be white or brown2. Music Player- we'll have a customized a flash music player
- just put a placeholder here (about 2-columns wide)3. Main Navigation- at the moment there's 6 menus, we should have the chance to extend that to 7 or 8 later4. Feature Billboard- has a defined size of 480 x 276 px
- description will be ajax animated (HTML)- mininum size of cover thumbs is 50 x 50 px
- 4 lines of text- mininum size of cover thumbs is 50 x 50 px
- 4 lines of text7. We want you- we'd love this to be an image banner with a button - as it should be bolder as the rest of the site and encourage artist to send us their demos8. Newsletter- same here, image banner with text field and button9. On Tour & In the media- mininum size of cover thumbs is 50 x 50 px
- 4 lines of text10. Latest News- headline, subline, image, teaser-text and read more button/link11. image banner (promotion)- doesn't have to be standard banner size. we'll use this only for promotion of our own products12. Footer navigation- Imprint, Disclaimer, Privacy13. Copyright Footer- just use some dummy text at the moment
For those who are interested: Website will be set up in Joomla 1.5; different style for the different boxes can be used sidewide.

Wants

- color scheme based on bardington main color (brown); background doesn't have to be dark-brwon; could be in light beige stripes or something light as well
- clear design, that looks fresh and not too static at the sametime
- warm and discrete color scheme - covers, fotos and text are most important
- 4-column concept that can be adapted for 2 and 3 column pages
- design that can be realized with HTML/CSS - no designs that require flash
- PSD or Illustrator Files